Twitter and other social networking sites are “all the rage” right now, and for good reason… they work! Building links with Twitter is a fast, free way to grow your online business and create backlinks and traffic for your website. Here are a number of “best practices” for using Twitter. These tips apply to both link building as well as good Twitter strategy in general.

• Growing your number of followers and building links with Twitter go hand in hand. Regular updates is important to building your Twitter followers. If someone visits your Twitter profile and it’s been weeks or months since you have updated, it is likely they will not be interested in following you.
• Make your tweets useful and interesting! Offer inspiration and useful information that people will want to retweet and you’ll gain new followers every day.
• Share your blog posts and articles with your Twitter followers. There are applications and plug-ins that will automatically tweet the title of a new blog post or article. Just be sure to keep your posts and articles worth reading or your followers will soon stop clicking through!
• Set up SocialOomph to retweet your best blog posts two to three weeks after they’ve been posted. If the quality’s good enough, you can generate a whole new influx of visitors and links with a few carefully tweeted updates about previous posts.
• Offer helpful tips and lists that people want and need. Encourage followers to retweet by adding “Pls RT” at the end of your post. Many people will if your information is good.
• Use a service like Twittley to automatically send a tweet whenever you bookmark a page you like, or when someone votes for a page you submitted. It’s a relatively new service, so you can get a good jump on the competition and more quickly build your online reputation there.
• Let your Twitter followers know you have articles available for free reprint on your site. Allow them to link directly to the article (which saves space on their server), or borrow them in full—with a link to your site, of course.
• Offer a guest blog post to your Twitter followers. Guest blogging is a quick and easy way to generate links to your site and it’s easy to reach several hundred, or thousand, prospective bloggers at once when you tweet your offer.
• Pay attention to what others tweet and see which items you link to. That’s a good indication of what appeals to similar folks. Look for helpful blog posts and articles, humorous pictures and videos, and freebies and discounts. Then offer the same kind of things.
• Give backlinks to others. Twitter is a give-and-take community. Don’t just expect links from your followers. Give links to them. Retweet their posts. Encourage them. Laugh at their jokes with an LOL! or :). Be real and others will be real with you.

Key to any Twitter strategy is to build sound relationships your followers. Get to know people and let them get to know you. Recommend good people on Follow Friday and tell people why someone is good to follow. Your Twitter friends will soon learn that you care about them, not just numbers, and they’ll be glad to link to your blog posts and articles you write.

Any link building strategy requires effort, but the added traffic and importance of your website makes the effort worthwhile so give it a tweet and see how building links with Twitter works for you.

Despite your best efforts, long hours and plenty of blood, sweat and tears, your social media efforts will most likely fail. Miserably.

Why? It’s about your intentions. More specifically, how your intentions are perceived.

You may have the best damn blanket in the world and want to tell the world about it. After all, once they know about it, they’ll surely want one. Or maybe ten! And obviously, they’ll be overjoyed that you’re blasting them on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with a steady stream of messages about how they can buy your amazing blanket, right?

No. You’re only going to piss them off and you will lose followers faster than you can say “tweet” if you start blasting them with your sales message. Instead, focus on adding value. Share information your followers can use, even if it doesn’t directly produce any revenue for your company. This will help you build goodwill and trust, and besides, it’s just good karma. Some great examples of people who do this on a daily basis are:

• @ShanePike
• @DonnaFontenot
• @aaronwall
• @graywolf
• @chriscoyier
• @PatFlynn

Social media is about building and nurturing relationships, and that doesn’t happen over night. If you want to be different than the 99% of people who fail at social media, you need to develop a plan, stick to it, be consistent and most of all, add value.

As social media continues to grow, it’s taking an increasing toll on your SEO efforts. The days of bloggers happily linking to relevant or interesting content are quickly disappearing, replaced instead by a snippet of text (lately, in 140 character increments) and a shortened, nofollowed link that’s all but worthless from a search engine optimization perspective.

But is it really the rise of social media, as some “so-called” SEO experts claim, that’s making it tougher to build quality links that corrolate to organic ranking, or is it something else?

The truth is, it’s a bit of both. Most social media channels, such as Facebook or Twitter, use a link shortening service and/or add the nofollow attribute to external links. This negates most, if not all of the potential SEO benefits of that link. But most people are using social media poorly anyway – you should be using it to establish and nurture relationships, not to blast your message to as many people as possible. Bloggers are still blogging, and while they may be posting less, they are still linking out from their posts. If you’ve used social media properly by building relationships, which takes time,  quite often you’ll find that these people mention you and link to your content without so much as a nudge from you. And if they don’t, it’s easy to ask them to help you get the word out if you’ve already established a relationship with them.

Social media may have changed some of the dynamics of SEO lately, but it certainly isn’t killing it. Search engine optimization always has and always will evolve, it’s up to you to adjust your strategies or become extinct.